Mike,

No one is heaping any additional responsibility on Ravi than what he himself committed. He wasn’t convicted of murder or any kind of homicide charge. In fact, he wasn’t even convicted of the full-scale hate crimes law, just the lesser charge of bias intimidation.

He attempted to tamper with evidence and intimidated witnesses to give a favorable testimony and never showed any remorse for what he did do, never mind the role it played in what he didn’t.

No, Dharin Ravi never pushed Clementi off the bridge. But he tortured the kid. In the 48 hours before Clementi’s death, Clementi was fixated on the tweets that Ravi posted, opening them up on his computer over a dozen times — to say nothing of how long he agonized over them each and every time.

There has to be a punishment for what Ravi did, a real punishment. Community service, probation and 30 days in a jail — not prison — doesn’t come anywhere close to it. This wasn’t a “lock him up and throw away the key” moment, but he certainly should have been in prison for the 5 or so years that seemed likely after the conviction by a jury of his peers.

I’m honestly beside myself right now. If vicious crimes can be committed against us and the perpetrators get off with no better than a wrist slap, there can be no equality for GLBT people.

They could have at least have had the decency to deport this sociopathic thug. Imagine all the thousands of gay spouses in America who face deportation every year, just because they’re gay — and the judge couldn’t even ship a bigot out to seas.

You know, we just locked up a non-violent grandma with a life sentence because she was tangentially involved in the sale of drugs (she didn’t do it, but she owned a bus where ‘too many people got caught with drugs’), in what way does it make sense to only lock up a Dharin Ravi for 30 days… when he actually committed acts of mental violence that caused someone to kill themselves, and showed no remorse at any point whatsoever?

I’ve never been part of the LGBT establishment

No, Pam… you’ve supplanted it! I swear, Pam, you’re a fresh of breath air. My friends and I used to scream at stupid decisions made by groups like the HRC, and their obsession over the cocktail parties over fighting for our rights.

Not only did it feel like there was nothing we could do about it… but it felt like there was no one to even talk to outside of the HRC ‘we have to be nice to people discriminating against it’ mindset. People like you have helped give a space for us to do that in — and people like you have helped force those groups to be ‘fiercer advocates’ in our civil rights, including the rights of the LB and T in GLBT.

Stigma is something we should work to crush and destroy… it either leads people to be persecuted, or makes things into taboos that ought not to be.

However treatable — or untreatable — psychopathy may be, it’s important to know those at risk of getting it, including kids with CU, and those who have it. That’s important both at a societal level, but also for the kids. Even if we can’t ‘cure’ it, with early treatment, it seems likely we can mitigate the worst of it and create circumstances where people who are predisposed of it are least likely to end up with it in the end.

But that’s never going to happen if we’re so worried about the ‘stigma’ that we never bother to even think about making a diagnosis.

There was really only ever one possibility coming out of this (end of the Euro, at least for much of the Euro Zone), the only question was how long it would take. If what we care about is people in the end, then the quicker, the better.

Whatever ego issues Olbermann had with his bosses made him have an ‘ego’ problem with all the schmucks who are trying to ruin our country, and I think that’s a very suitable trade-off.

Ultimately, he went from a cable network that everyone had to a cable network no one had, and still managed to keep 175,000 people watching every night. Not too shabby on Current.

It was probably just a mistake to go there in the first place, it didn’t give him many more advantages than starting something on his own…. and a whole lot of headaches for someone who has difficulty with bosses and came from a network with money for proper sets and tech.

All that said, everyone who seems to be writing his obit may want to gain some insight into how society works. This public firing will be forgotten in about T – 3 days, and he’ll go off and do something else for a few years. Hopefully, he’ll do something else in which he’s his own boss. If he does it long enough, he’ll have his comeback.

Personally, I’d love to see him go web and syndication, and focus on that as a way to keep up his PR… and use that PR to work on good books and maybe a couple documentaries. I bet he could make a freaking awesome documentary on something like Wall St. that would be devastating and actually sell on the Box Office.

I’ve never been very high on the mandate, at least without a public option, but it’s ridiculous to suggest it’s unconstitutional. There’s really no ‘last laugh’ about this; our courts, left unchecked, are quickly turning our country into a neo-aristocracy, with corporations at the top and people left begging for whatever scraps are left. No thanks.

The idea that Social Security and Medicare are constitutional, but the mandate isn’t, is just silly. And the notion that as soon as someone steps into the Doctor’s Office, we could then force the mandate on them, but not before, is even more bizarre — and both the opposition even concedes that would be constitutional.

Quite frankly, I think it’s unlikely that this bill survives without the mandate, at least survives in a way that protects people with ‘pre-existing conditions,’ which in reality was the most important thing about the ACA. It alone makes the bill worth keeping.

Of course, Democrats in DC should have foreseen this crisis and made a better bill from the start. They simply should have created a medicare for all ‘default’ and allowed other options, similar to the German system. Obama could have pushed that type of bill through if he was willing to be as tough on conservative democrats as he was progressives. But he wasn’t. So I have little sympathy for him in all of this… it was a problem of his own creation.

Smoking is a killer, but at least it slowly killed people over many decades. The banks ruined millions of lives overnight and nearly destroyed the entire worldwide economy.

It’s simply amazing that the DoJ could get the tobacco settlement so right… and this one so wrong. If anything, this settlement should have been much bigger than the one we got with Big Tobacco in the 90s.

This settlement with the banks wasn’t just not enough, it was insulting. We’d have been better off if we just let the states deal with this alone, but then again the banks, Obama and the states all knew that…

A couple important facts:

1. Catholic Charities receive hundreds of millions of dollars across the nation from state, federal and local governments for funding, largely for adoption services. When they had adoption services in Massachusetts, the amount our state gave to them was a) a majority of their entire funding for adoption services and b) millions of dollars a year.

2. Catholic Charities have been adopting to gay parents across the nation for decades. It only ever became an issue when gay marriage because a wedge issue, and only then because the bishops overruled the local boards (who were generally fine with it) and made it an issue. This is exactly how it’s played out in Massachusetts and in other places.

So, between the fact that this is a purely manufactured crisis to try to pull the public against marriage equality and the fact that these adoption services are essentially publicly funded, I have absolutely, positively NO SYMPATHY for these organizations and the Bishops steering them into absurdly anti-gay positions.

If the Catholic Church would like to be bigoted in its services… that’s absolutely fine. They just can’t both be bigoted and suck at the government teat for their every social service. Let’s see how long their no-birth-control privately funded hospitals, that don’t accept medicare or medicaid, can last, or how well they can fund their social services without the hundreds of millions the government pours into them.

I’m pretty sure it’s time for a new tag line. The Catholic Church: Reducing communal lines one Culture War at a time!

It’s amazing little old Angela Merkel has been able to accomplish what Napoleon and Hitler could only dream of, without so much as a single country invaded: a “unified” Europe in their vision, benefiting their home country, first and foremost.

That the people of Greece should be driven to 3rd World Status to save German banks and to preserve the rest of the EU is unacceptable — and that’s what this is really all about, right?

It’s at the point where Greeks ought to consider rebelling — not by military force, but by refusing to recognize the legitimacy of their EU/IMF/ECB sponsored-and-approved parliament. By the time they’re done looting Greece, there may be nothing left, and the Greeks can’t let that happen.

The first amendment, including the freedom of religion, isn’t meant to protect the Catholic Church from the nurses, janitors and secretaries who work in their federally-funded hospitals.

It’s meant to protect the nurses, janitors and secretaries who work in those federally-funded hospitals from the church’s affiliated hospitals.

The bill of rights are designed, first and foremost, to protect the little people from larger entities, including the government. Not the other way around, which is what the Catholic Church is trying to do here.

No organization has a right to take money from the federal government and then discriminate against their employees. Period.

I’m sure Taibbi is right, but even the threat of taking them on — and holding out — had to be worth a much bigger settlement for the states than this.

You know… I’m not completely opposed to some level of sell-out to get a settlement. That’s the nature of settlements and, more often that not, the direct relief and guaranteed win is worth the potential of not getting everything you otherwise could (and the potential risk of getting *nothing* if you lose).

However, this as a settlement was an utter disgrace. $26 billion next to the trillion or more in real damages is like getting 2 or 3 cents back on a dollar. That’s unacceptable.

The settlement should have at least brought back 10-20 cents on that dollar, and included provisions that ensured the banks could never get away with this stuff again… instead of future immunity to a problem *that is still going on at a massive scale.*

The fact that it’s still happening is reason enough to stop a settlement from happening.

What an incredibly offensive thing to say… however, if some bigot said that to me in my face… far from getting mad, I probably would just start laughing hysterically. Those kinds of people are just insane.

The question has to be asked: will these assassinations stop Iran from producing nuclear weapons — even for a fairly decent chunk of time. The answer that question, by just about everyone I’ve heard, is no.

So, what does that leave the US and Israel? A pissed off Iran that’s going to be nuclear armed and without a few extra scientists who actually know what they’re doing, to keep it safe.

I don’t think anyone outside of Iran wants to see a nuclear-equipped Iran, but after invading Iraq and after bombing the shit out of Libya (and I don’t even necessarily disagree with that one), and comparing those incidents to North Korea, it’s easy to understand why the government in Iran isn’t going to care very much what anyone else thinks. If they get nuclear weapons, they’re home free from ever having to worry about any American “regime change.”

That’s the reality of the situation, whether we like it or not. We may as well accept that fact and realize Iran is going to get nuclear weapons. If we accept that reality, we want to make sure that they’re a) going to do it safely, and b) going to embrace diplomacy and the wider world at large.

I think it’s time to seriously reconsider how we deal with Iran and other countries like it and instead of ignoring them them, engaging with them and trying to improve relations and improve the livelihoods of the people living in it. In the end, it’s going to be those people who enforce change in Iran and we’re going to want to be in good relations with the regular people of that country for when they have their own Arab Spring… and ensure that there are mechanisms in place to keep the nukes safe when that happens, as scary as that’ll be.

The Lowell Sun has a long history of being a tea-hadist rag that wouldn’t know news if it hit them in the head. But this is pretty damn low, even for them.

I desperately wish I could be there tonight /sigh.

Nothing will happen at midnight — it would be too easy for the local news to just extend their 11pm news coverage of it. They’ll wait until 2-3 AM, maybe even 4, before they pull out their thug tactics and go bust some heads. That way, the live news crews are gone, and all that’s left are a bunch of cell phone cameras that can’t pick up good photos in the darkness of night.

May the full moon glow with a brilliant glare tonight, and may there be no clouds to get in the way. I have no doubts that what goes on tonight will be worse than what happened when the police first arrested hundreds at OccupyBoston, when they tried to open up an expansion to their camp.

When the Supreme Court said money=speech, I didn’t think this is what they had in mind…